6 Types of Travellers

Travel is a wonderful thing. It widens your horizons, enriches you and gives you cool new photos which you can show off by putting them on Facebook. People travel in different ways according to which they can be neatly slotted into any of these 6 broad, grossly under-researched categories. Try and identify which kind of traveller you are!

1.       The Budget Traveller: You know you’re a budget traveller when your official source of income is called, “pocket money”. Budget travellers will always try to spend less on their entire trip than whatever is the normal rickshaw fare from Devdaya Nagar to Naupada.  Their preferred mode of transport is shoes.

2.       The Business Traveller: These people travel not to see different cultures but to make sure that those different cultures are buying their product. The whole world looks the same to them: like the inside of a 5 star hotel room. By the end of their stay the only thing they will know about the place are the taxi fares. The business traveller is always willing to try the local cuisine because clearly it can’t be worse than airline food.

3.       The Adventure traveller: These are the travellers that go to off-beat, all-action destinations like Bhandup. Ok, no, I was just kidding. You’ll usually find this kind of traveller near mountain tops, in jungles or in a raft, pedalling perilously close to waterfalls. They constantly seek adrenaline fuelled travels and get thoroughly bored in places where they can’t put their lives at risk.  

4.       The Spiritual Traveller: There are many places around the world that are said to be sacred and of mythological importance and usually these places are pretty difficult to reach. Nevertheless, these are the haunts of the spiritual travellers. They travel with little else apart from a few clothes and a lot of faith (Shoes are optional). They will go to any lengths braving nature, discomfort and even those irritating souvenir salesmen to pay their dues to their god.

5.       Itinerary travellers: These will usually consist of families. It seems that the best way to take the lovely family on vacation is to dump said family on to a bus and then pray that tour doesn’t take very long. The itinerary travellers basically like to see whatever comes up first on a Google search of, “places to see in (insert location here)”. They skim the surface of the places they go to because that’s all the time they get before their youngest child starts bawling and saying, “NUMBER TWO! NUMBER TWO KARNA HAI!”

6.       The Tortoise Travellers: Who is a tortoise traveller you ask? Tortoise travellers are those who insist on carrying their home with them; that is having a home-like experience no matter where they go. They are the ones who will pay huge sums of money to go to a new place only to eat at restaurants that serve the food they make back home. They will constantly crib about the difference in temperature, cuisine and people always insisting that where they live is better in every possible way. These are the people who should never be issued a passport.

When you Break Up why do you Break Down?

A friend of mine just went through a break-up and it got me thinking: would a blue tie suit me more than a yellow one. Ok, no seriously it got me thinking: When you Break Up why do you Break Down? It was a deep philosophical question to which I had no answer.

After spending a lot of time counselling my friend I decided that I have enough expertise on the matter, to write an article on how to deal with a break up:

So you’ve just had a break up. The world seems all dreary. You’re wondering if God suddenly changed the settings from colour to black and white. The chirping of the birds has stopped but thats because they don’t usually chirp at one in the morning.

How is it always the wrong couple that ends up parting ways? Its always the couples who are best suited for each other or the ones that really seem made for one other who end up not getting their act right, whereas that irritating girl who another friend of mine met at a nightclub, just for fun, doesn’t look like she’ll ever go.

That, however, is beside the point. What is of importance is the fact that now you’re single. So you do what every guy does when he first becomes single: grow a beard. And then after a while you start to come to terms with the fact that you might not see her again. For some this phase comes early for others it happens when they’re given 10 years imprisonment for undue harassment.

The worst part of a break up is wondering what to do with all that new found time. While you were going out, time was as abundant as food in Ethopia. You used to spend hours on the phone, meeting and fighting over issues that make Roadies seem intellectual. And now suddenly you don’t know what to do with the 17 extra hours you’ve gotten. This is the time that you should use to better yourself. To do things you’ve never done before like working out, learning to play an instrument and cleaning your underarms.

The trick is to keep yourself busy at all times because you’ll invariably get thoughts of her in your head and you’ll feel the pangs of sadness. In a lot of ways it will be just like a cricket telecast. You’ll have a short enjoyable over of cricket before those woeful ads come up again. Start doing tasks that will require your fullest concentration so that she can’t wriggle into your mind at all. For example: bull-fighting, sky-diving and snake-wrangling are all highly recommended activities.

Of course no break-up is complete without the break-up playlist. It doesn’t matter what kind of music you usually listen to, when you’ve had a break-up you will invariably be reduced to Avril Lavigne, Bryan Adams and Sonu Nigam. It’s a miracle how music becomes so necessary to a broken heart. All of a sudden ‘Every night in my dreams’ explains the entire crux of your existence and you wonder why Enrique Iglesias hasn’t got the Nobel Prize in Literature for the lyrics of 'Do you know?(The Ping Pong Song)'.

Break ups are always unpleasant but the thing to remember is that it will pass. Always look on the bright side. They say that every person has 7 people who look identical to them in the world. All you have to do is find the other 7 people who look like your ex!